For the extinction of slavery he would wait; for a decision on the principle of slavery he would not. It was idle to protest against agitation of the question. If politicians would be silent that would not get rid of "this same mighty deep-seated power that somehow operates on the minds of men, exciting them and stirring them up in every avenue of society—in politics, in religion, in literature, in morals, in all the manifold relations of life." The stand, temperate as it was, that he advocated against slavery should be taken at once and finally. The difference, of which people grown accustomed to slavery among their neighbours thought little, between letting it be in Missouri, which they could not help, and letting it cross the border into Kansas, which they could help, appeared to Lincoln the whole tremendous gulf between right and wrong, between a wise people's patience with ills they could not cure and a profligate people's acceptance of evil as their good. And here there was a distinction between Lincoln and many Republicans, which again may seem subtle, but which was really far wider than that which separated him from the Abolitionists. Slavery must be stopped from spreading into Kansas not because, as it turned out, the immigrants into Kansas mostly did not want it, but because it was wrong, and the United States, where they were free to act, would not have it. The greatest evil in the repeal of the Missouri Compromise was the laxity of public tone which had made it possible. "Little by little, but steadily as man's march to the grave, we have been giving up the old faith for the new faith." Formerly some deference to the "central idea" of equality was general and in some sort of abstract sense slavery was admitted to be wrong. Now it was boldly claimed by the South that "slavery in the abstract was right." All the most powerful influences in the country, "Mammon" (for "the slave property is worth a billion dollars"), "fashion, philosophy," and even "the theology of the day," were enlisted in favour of this opinion. And it met with no resistance. "You yourself may detest slavery; but your neighbour has five or six slaves, and he is an excellent neighbour, or your son has married his daughter, and they beg you to help save their property, and you vote against your interests and principle to oblige a neighbour, hoping your vote will be on the losing side." And again "the party lash and the fear of ridicule will overawe justice and liberty; for it is a singular fact, but none the less a fact and well known by the most common experience, that men will do things under the terror of the party lash that they would not on any account or for any consideration do otherwise; while men, who will march up to the mouth of a loaded cannon without shrinking, will run from the terrible name of 'Abolitionist,' even when pronounced by a worthless creature whom they with good reason despise." And so people in the North, who could hardly stomach the doctrine that slavery was good, yet lapsed into the feeling that it was a thing indifferent, a thing for which they might rightly shuffle off their responsibility on to the immigrants into Kansas. This feeling that it was indifferent Lincoln pursued and chastised with special scorn. But the principle of freedom that they were surrendering was the principle of freedom for themselves as well as for the negro. The sense of the negro's rights had been allowed to go back till the prospect of emancipation for him looked immeasurably worse than it had a generation before. They must recognise that when, by their connivance, they had barred and bolted the door upon the negro, the spirit of tyranny which they had evoked would then "turn and rend them." The "central idea" which had now established itself in the intellect of the Southern was one which favoured the enslavement of man by man "apart from colour." A definite choice had to be made between the principle of the fathers, which asserted certain rights for all men, and that other principle against which the fathers had rebelled and of which the "divine right of kings" furnished Lincoln with his example. In what particular manner the white people would be made to feel the principle of tyranny when they had definitely "denied freedom to others" and ceased to "deserve it for themselves" Lincoln did not attempt to say, and perhaps only dimly imagined. But he was as convinced as any prophet that America stood at the parting of the ways and must choose now the right principle or the wrong with all its consequences.

The principle of tyranny presented itself for their choice in a specious form in Douglas' "great patent, everlasting principle of 'popular sovereignty.'" This alleged principle was likely, so to say, to take upon their blind side men who were sympathetic to the impatience of control of any crowd resembling themselves but not sympathetic to humanity of another race and colour. The claim to some divine and indefeasible right of sovereignty overriding all other considerations of the general good, on the part of a majority greater or smaller at any given time in any given area, is one which can generally be made to bear a liberal semblance, though it certainly has no necessary validity. Americans had never before thought of granting it in the case of their outlying and unsettled dominions; they would never, for instance, as Lincoln remarked, have admitted the claim of settlers like the Mormons to make polygamy lawful in the territory they occupied. In the manner in which it was now employed the proposed principle could, as Lincoln contended, be reduced to this simple form "that, if one man chooses to enslave another, no third man shall have the right to object."

It is impossible to estimate how far Lincoln foresaw the strain to which a firm stand against slavery would subject the Union. It is likely enough that those worst forebodings for the Union, which events proved to be very true, were confined to timid men who made a practice of yielding to threats. Lincoln appreciated better than many of his fellows the sentiment of the South, but it is often hard for men, not in immediate contact with a school of thought which seems to them thoroughly perverse, to appreciate its pervasive power, and Lincoln was inclined to stake much upon the hope that reason will prevail. Moreover, he had a confidence in the strength of the Union which might have been justified if his predecessor in office had been a man of ordinary firmness. But it is not to be supposed that any undue hopefulness, if he felt it, influenced his judgment. He was of a temper which does not seek to forecast what the future has to show, and his melancholy prepared him well for any evil that might come. Two things we can say with certainty of his aim and purpose. On the one hand, as has already been said, whatever view he had taken of the peril to the Union he would never have sought to avoid the peril by what appeared to him a surrender of the principle which gave the Union its worth. On the other hand, he must always have been prepared to uphold the Union at whatever the cost might prove to be. To a man of deep and gentle nature war will always be hateful, but it can never, any more than an individual death, appear the worst of evils. And the claim of the Southern States to separate from a community which to him was venerable and to form a new nation, based on slavery and bound to live in discord with its neighbors, did not appeal to him at all, though in a certain literal sense it was a claim to liberty. His attitude to any possible movement for secession was defined four years at least before secession came, in words such as it was not his habit to use without full sense of their possible effect or without much previous thought. They were quite simple: "We won't break up the Union, and you shan't."

Such were the main thoughts which would be found to animate the whole of Lincoln's notable campaign, beginning with his first encounter with Douglas in 1855 and culminating in his prolonged duel with him in the autumn of 1858. It is unnecessary here to follow the complexities, especially in regard to the Dred Scott judgments, through which the discussion wandered. It is now worth few men's while to do more than glance at two or three of his speeches at that period; his speeches in the formal Lincoln-Douglas debates, except the first, are not the best of them. A scientific student of rhetoric, as the art by which man do actually persuade crowds, might indeed do well to watch closely the use by Douglas and Lincoln of their respective weapons, but for most of us it is an unprofitable business to read reiterated argument, even though in beautiful language, upon points of doubt that no longer trouble us. Lincoln does not always show to advantage; later readers have found him inferior in urbanity to Douglas, of whom he disapproved, while Douglas probably disapproved of no man; his speeches are, of course, not free either from unsound arguments or from the rough and tumble of popular debate; occasionally he uses hackneyed phrases; but it is remarkable that a hackneyed or a falsely sentimental phrase in Lincoln comes always as a lapse and a surprise. Passages abound in these speeches which to almost any literate taste are arresting for the simple beauty of their English, a beauty characteristic of one who had learned to reason with Euclid and learned to feel and to speak with the authors of the Bible. And in their own kind they were a classic and probably unsurpassed achievement. Though Lincoln had to deal with a single issue demanding no great width of knowledge, it must be evident that the passions aroused by it and the confused and shifting state of public sentiment made his problem very subtle, and it was a rare profundity and sincerity of thought which solved it in his own mind. In expressing the result of thought so far deeper than that of most men, he achieved a clearness of expression which very few writers, and those among the greatest, have excelled. He once during the Presidential election of 1856 wrote to a supporter of Fillmore to persuade him of a proposition which must seem paradoxical to anyone not deeply versed in American institutions, namely, that it was actually against Fillmore's interest to gain votes from Fremont in Illinois. He demonstrated his point, but he was not always judicious in his way of addressing solemn strangers, and in his rural manner he concludes his letter, "the whole thing is as simple as figuring out the weight of three small hogs," and this inelegant sentence conveys with little exaggeration one especial merit of his often austerely graceful language. Grave difficulties are handled in a style which could arouse all the interest of a boy and penetrate the understanding of a case-hardened party man.

But if in comparison with the acknowledged masterpieces of our prose we rank many passages in these speeches very high—and in fact the men who have appreciated them most highly have been fastidious scholars—we shall not yet have measured Lincoln's effort and performance. For these are not the compositions of a cloistered man of letters, they are the outpourings of an agitator upon the stump. The men who think hard are few; few of them can clothe their thought in apt and simple words; very, very few are those who in doing this could hold the attention of a miscellaneous and large crowd. Popular government owes that comparative failure, of which in recent times we have taken perhaps exaggerated notice, partly to the blindness of the polite world to the true difficulty and true value of work of this kind; and the importance which Roman education under the Empire gave to rhetoric was the mark not of deadness, but of the survival of a manly public spirit. Lincoln's wisdom had to utter itself in a voice which would reach the outskirts of a large and sometimes excited crowd in the open air. It was uttered in strenuous conflict with a man whose reputation quite overshadowed his; a person whose extraordinary and good-humoured vitality armed him with an external charm even for people who, like Mrs. Beecher Stowe, detested his principles; an orator whose mastery of popular appeal and of resourceful and evasive debate was quite unhampered by any weakness for the truth. The utterance had to be kept up day after day and night after night for a quarter of a year, by a man too poor to afford little comforts, travelling from one crowded inn to another, by slow trains on a railway whose officials paid little attention to him, while his more prosperous and distinguished rival could travel in comfort and comparative magnificence. The physical strain of electioneering, which is always considerable, its alternation of feverish excitement with a lassitude that, after a while, becomes prevailing and intense, were in this case far greater and more prolonged than in any other instance recorded of English or probably of American statesmen. If, upon his sudden elevation shortly afterwards, Lincoln was in a sense an obscure man raised up by chance, he was nevertheless a man who had accomplished a heroic labour.

On the whole the earthen vessel in which he carried his treasure of clear thought and clean feelings appears to have enhanced its flavour. There was at any rate nothing outward about him that aroused the passion of envy. A few peculiarly observant men were immediately impressed with his distinction, but there is no doubt that to the ordinary stranger he appeared as a very odd fish. "No portraits that I have ever seen," writes one, "do justice to the awkwardness and ungainliness of his figure." Its movements when he began to speak rather added to its ungainliness, and, though to a trained actor his elocution seemed perfect, his voice when he first opened his mouth surprised and jarred upon the hearers with a harsh note of curiously high pitch. But it was the sort of oddity that arrests attention, and people's attention once caught was apt to be held by the man's transparent earnestness. Soon, as he lost thought of himself in his subject, his voice and manner changed; deeper notes, of which friends record the beauty, rang out, the sad eyes kindled, and the tall, gaunt figure, with the strange gesture of the long, uplifted arms, acquired even a certain majesty. Hearers recalled afterwards with evident sincerity the deep and instantaneous impression of some appeal to simple conscience, as when, "reaching his hands towards the stars of that still night," he proclaimed, "in some things she is certainly not my equal, but in her natural right to eat the bread that she has earned with the sweat of her brow, she is my equal, and the equal of Judge Douglas, and the equal of any man." Indeed, upon a sympathetic audience, already excited by the occasion, he could produce an effect which the reader of his recorded speeches would hardly believe. Of his speech at an early state convention of the Republican party there is no report except that after a few sentences every reporter laid down his pen for the opposite of the usual reason, and, as he proceeded, "the audience arose from their chairs and with pale faces and quivering lips pressed unconsciously towards him." And of his speech on another similar occasion several witnesses seem to have left descriptions hardly less incongruous with English experience of public meetings. If we credit him with these occasional manifestations of electric oratory—as to which it is certain that his quiet temperament did at times blaze out in a surprising fashion—it is not to be thought that he was ordinarily what could be called eloquent; some of his speeches are commonplace enough, and much of his debating with Douglas is of a drily argumentative kind that does honour to the mass meetings which heard it gladly. But the greatest gift of the orator he did possess; the personality behind the words was felt. "Beyond and above all skill," says the editor of a great paper who heard him at Peoria, "was the overwhelming conviction imposed upon the audience that the speaker himself was charged with an irresistible and inspiring duty to his fellow men."

One fact about the method of his speaking is easily detected. In debate, at least, he had no use for perorations, and the reader who looks for them will often find that Lincoln just used up the last few minutes in clearing up some unimportant point which he wanted to explain only if there was time for it. We associate our older Parliamentary oratory with an art which keeps the hearer pleasedly expectant rather than dangerously attentive, through an argument which if dwelt upon might prove unsubstantial, secure that it all leads in the end to some great cadence of noble sound. But in Lincoln's argumentative speeches the employment of beautiful words is least sparing at the beginning or when he passes to a new subject. It seems as if he deliberately used up his rhetorical effects at the outset to put his audience in the temper in which they would earnestly follow him and to challenge their full attention to reasoning which was to satisfy their calmer judgment. He put himself in a position in which if his argument were not sound nothing could save his speech from failure as a speech. Perhaps no standing epithet of praise hangs with such a weight on a man's reputation as the epithet "honest." When the man is proved not to be a fraud, it suggests a very mediocre virtue. But the method by which Lincoln actually confirmed his early won and dangerous reputation of honesty was a positive and potent performance of rare distinction. It is no mean intellectual and spiritual achievement to be as honest in speech with a crowd as in the dearest intercourse of life. It is not, of course, pretended that he never used a fallacious argument or made an unfair score—he was entirely human. But this is the testimony of an Illinois political wire-puller to Lincoln: "He was one of the shrewdest politicians in the State. Nobody had more experience in that way. Nobody knew better what was passing in the minds of the people. Nobody knew better how to turn things to advantage politically." And then he goes on—and this is really the sum of what is to be said of his oratory: "He could not cheat people out of their votes any more than he could out of their money."

3. Lincoln against Douglas.

It has now to be told how the contest with Douglas which concluded Lincoln's labours in Illinois affected the broad stream of political events in America as a whole. Lincoln, as we know, was still only a local personage; Illinois is a State bigger than Ireland, but it is only a little part and was still a rather raw and provincial part of the United States; but Douglas had for years been a national personage, for a time the greatest man among the Democrats, and now, for a reason which did him honour, he was in disgrace with many of his party and on the point of becoming the hero of all moderate Republicans.

We need not follow in much detail the events of the great political world. The repeal of the Missouri Compromise threw it into a ferment, which the continuing disorders in Kansas were in themselves sufficient to keep up. New great names were being made in debate in the Senate; Seward, the most powerful opponent of the repeal of the Missouri Compromise, kept his place as the foremost man in the Republican party not by consistency in the stand that he made, but by his mastery of New York political machinery; Sumner of Massachusetts, the friend of John Bright, kept up a continual protest for freedom in turgid, scholarly harangues, which caught the spirit of Cicero's Philippics most successfully in their personal offensiveness. Powerful voices in literature and the Press were heard upon the same side—the New York Tribune, edited by Horace Greeley, acquired, as far as a paper in so large a country can, a national importance. Broadly it may be said that the stirring intellect of America old and young was with the Republicans—it is a pleasant trifle to note that Longfellow gave up a visit to Europe to vote for Fremont as President, and we know the views of Motley and of Lowell and of Darwin's fellow labourer Asa Gray. But fashion and that better and quite different influence, the tone of opinion prevailing in the pleasantest society, inclined always to the Southern view of every question, and these influences were nowhere more felt than among Washington politicians. A strong and respectable group of Southern Senators, of whom Jefferson Davis was the strongest, were the real driving power of the administration. Convivial President Pierce and doting President Buchanan after him were complaisant to their least scrupulous suggestions in a degree hardly credible of honourable men who were not themselves Southerners.

One famous incident of life in Congress must be told to explain the temper of the times. In 1856, during one of the many debates that arose out of Kansas, Sumner recited in the Senate a speech conscientiously calculated to sting the slave-owning Senators to madness. Sumner was a man with brains and with courage and rectitude beyond praise, set off by a powerful and noble frame, but he lacked every minor quality of greatness. He would not call his opponent in debate a skunk, but he would expend great verbal ingenuity in coupling his name with repeated references to that animal's attributes. On this occasion he used to the full both the finer and the most exquisitely tasteless qualities of his eloquence. This sort of thing passed the censorship of many excellent Northern men who would lament Lincoln's lack of refinement; and though from first to last the serious provocation in their disputes lay in the set policy of the Southern leaders, it ought to be realised that they, men who for the most part were quite kind to their slaves and had long ago argued themselves out of any compunction about slavery, were often exposed to intense verbal provocation. Nevertheless, what followed on Sumner's speech is terribly significant of the depravation of Southern honour.

Congressman Preston Brooks, of South Carolina, had an uncle in the Senate; South Carolina, and this Senator in particular, had been specially favoured with self-righteous insolence in Sumner's speech. A day or so later the Senate had just risen and Sumner sat writing at his desk in the Senate chamber in a position in which he could not quickly rise. Brooks walked in, burning with piety towards his State and his uncle, and in the presence, it seems, of Southern Senators who could have stopped him, beat Sumner on the head with a stick with all his might. Sumner was incapacitated by injuries to his spine for nearly five years. Brooks, with a virtuous air, explained in Congress that he had caught Sumner in a helpless attitude because if Sumner had been free to use his superior strength he, Brooks, would have had to shoot him with his revolver. It seems to be hardly an exaggeration to say that the whole South applauded Brooks and exulted. Exuberant Southerners took to challenging Northern men, knowing well that their principles compelled them to refuse duels, but that the refusal would still be humiliating to the North. Brooks himself challenged Burlingame, a distinguished Congressman afterwards sent by Lincoln as Minister to China, who had denounced him. Burlingame accepted, and his second arranged for a rifle duel at a wild spot across the frontier at Niagara. Brooks then drew back; he alleged, perhaps sincerely, that he would have been murdered on his way through the Northern States, but Northern people were a little solaced. The whole disgusting story contains only one pleasant incident. Preston Brooks, who, after numbers of congratulations, testimonials, and presentations, died within a year of his famous exploit, had first confessed himself tired of being a hero to every vulgar bully in the South!

Now, though this dangerous temper burned steadily in the South, and there were always sturdy Republicans ready to provoke it, and questions arising out of slavery would constantly recur to disturb high political circles, it is not to be imagined that opinion in the North, the growing and bustling portion of the States, would remain for years excited about the repeal of the Missouri Compromise. In 1857 men's minds were agitated by a great commercial depression and collapse of credit, and in 1858 there took place one of the most curious (for it would seem to have deserved this cold description) of evanescent religious revivals. Meanwhile, by 1857 the actual bloodshed in Kansas had come to an end under the administration of an able Governor; the enormous majority of settlers in Kansas were now known to be against slavery and it was probably assumed that the legalisation of slavery could not be forced upon them. Prohibition of slavery there by Congress thus began to seem needless, and the Dred Scott judgments raised at least a grave doubt as to whether it was possible. Thus enthusiasm for the original platform of the Republicans was cooling down, and to the further embarrassment of that party, when towards the end of 1857 the Southern leaders attempted a legislative outrage, the great champion of the Northern protest was not a Republican, but Douglas himself.

A Convention had been elected in Kansas to frame a State Constitution. It represented only a fraction of the people, since, for some reason good or bad, the opponents of slavery did not vote in the election. But it was understood that whatever Constitution was framed would be submitted to the popular vote. The Convention framed a Constitution legalising slavery, and its proposals came before Congress backed by the influence of Buchanan. Under them the people of Kansas were to vote whether they would have this Constitution as it stood, or have it with the legalisation of slavery restricted to the slaves who had then been brought into the territory. No opportunity was to be given them of rejecting the Constitution altogether, though Governor Walker, himself in favor of slavery, assured the President that they wished to do so. Ultimately, by way of concession to vehement resistance, the majority in Congress passed an Act under which the people in Kansas were to vote simply for or against the slavery Constitution as it stood, only—if they voted for it, they as a State were to be rewarded with a large grant of public lands belonging to the Union in their territory. Eventually the Kansas people, unmoved by this bribe, rejected the Constitution by a majority of more than 11,000 to 1,800. Now, the Southern leaders, three years before, had eagerly joined with Douglas to claim a right of free choice for the Kansas people. The shamelessness of this attempt to trick them out of it is more significant even than the tale of Preston Brooks. There was no hot blood there; the affair was quietly plotted by respected leaders of the South. They were men in many ways of character and honour, understood by weak men like Buchanan to represent the best traditions of American public life. But, as they showed also in other instances that cannot be related here, slavery had become for them a sacred cause which hallowed almost any means. It is essential to remember this in trying to understand the then political situation.

Douglas here behaved very honourably. He, with his cause of popular sovereignty, could not have afforded to identify himself with the fraud on Kansas, but he was a good enough trickster to have made his protest safely if he had cared to do so. As it was he braved the hatred of Buchanan and the fury of his Southern friends by instant, manly, courageous, and continued opposition. It may therefore seem an ungracious thing that, immediately after this, Lincoln should have accepted the invitation of his friends to oppose Douglas' re-election. To most of the leading Republicans out of Illinois it seemed altogether unwise and undesirable that their party, which had seemed to be losing ground, should do anything but welcome Douglas as an ally. Of these Seward indeed went too far for his friends, and in his sanguine hope that it would work for freedom was ready to submit to the doctrine of "popular sovereignty"; but, except the austere Chase, now Governor of Ohio, who this once, but unfortunately not again, was whole-heartedly with Lincoln, the Republican leaders in the East, and great Republican journals, like the Tribune, declared their wish that Douglas should be re-elected. Why, then, did Lincoln stand against him?

It has often been suggested that his personal feelings towards Douglas played some part in the matter, though no one thinks they played the chief part. Probably they did play a part, and it is a relief to think that Lincoln thoroughly gratified some minor feelings in this contest. Lincoln no doubt enjoyed measuring himself against other men; and it was galling to his ambition to have been so completely outstripped by a man inferior to him in every power except that of rapid success. He had also the deepest distrust for Douglas as a politician, thinking that he had neither principle nor scruple, though Herndon, who knew, declares he neither distrusted nor had cause to distrust Douglas in his professional dealings as a lawyer. He had, by the way, one definite, if trifling, score to wipe off. After their joint debate at Peoria in 1855 Douglas, finding him hard to tackle, suggested to Lincoln that they should both undertake to make no more speeches for the present. Lincoln oddly assented at once, perhaps for no better reason than a ridiculous difficulty, to which he once confessed, in refusing any request whatever. Lincoln of course had kept this agreement strictly, while Douglas had availed himself of the first temptation to break it. Thus on all grounds we may be sure that Lincoln took pleasure in now opposing Douglas. But to go further and say that the two men cordially hated each other is probably to misread both. There is no necessary connection between a keen desire to beat a man and any sort of malignity towards him. That much at least may be learned in English schools, and the whole history of his dealing with men shows that in some school or other Lincoln had learned it very thoroughly. Douglas, too, though an unscrupulous, was not, we may guess, an ungenerous man.

But the main fact of the matter is that Lincoln would have turned traitor to his rooted convictions if he had not stood up and fought Douglas even at this moment when Douglas was deserving of some sympathy. Douglas, it must be observed, had simply acted on his principle that the question between slavery and freedom was to be settled by local, popular choice; he claimed for the white men of Kansas the fair opportunity of voting; given that, he persistently declared, "I do not care whether slavery be voted up or voted down." In Lincoln's settled opinion this moral attitude of indifference to the wrongfulness of slavery, so long as respect was had to the liberties of the privileged race, was, so to say, treason to the basic principle of the American Commonwealth, a treason which had steadily been becoming rife and upon which it was time to stamp.

There can be no doubt of his earnestness about this. But the Republican leaders, honourably enough, regarded this as an unpractical line to take, and indeed to the political historian this is the most crucial question in American history. Nobody can say that civil war would or would not have occurred if this or that had been done a little differently, but Abraham Lincoln, at this crisis of his life, did, in pursuance of his peculiarly cherished principle, forge at least a link in the chain of events which actually precipitated the war. And he did it knowing better than any other man that he was doing something of great national importance, involving at least great national risk. Was he pursuing his principles, moderate as they were in the original conception, with fanaticism, or at the best preferring a solemn consistency of theory to the conscientious handling of facts not reducible to theory? As a question of practical statesmanship in the largest sense, how did matters really stand in regard to slavery and to the relations between South and North, and what was Lincoln's idea of "putting slavery back where the fathers placed it" really worth?

Herndon in these days went East to try to enlist the support of the great men for Lincoln. He found them friendly but immovable. Editor Horace Greeley said to him: "The Republican standard is too high; we want something practical." This, we may be pretty sure, stiffened Lincoln's back, as a man with a cause that he cared for, and, for that matter, as a really shrewd manager in a party which he thought stood for something. It reveals the flabbiness which the Northerners were in danger of making a governing tradition of policy. The wrongfulness of any extension of slavery might be loudly asserted in 1854, but in 1858, when it no longer looked as if so great an extension of it was really imminent, there was no harm in shifting towards some less provocative principle on which more people at the moment might agree. Confronted with Northern politicians who would reason in this fashion stood a united South whose leaders were by now accustomed to make the Union Government go which way they chose and had no sort of disposition to compromise their principle in the least. "What," as Lincoln put it in an address given, not long after his contest with Douglas, at the Cooper Institute in New York, "what do you think will content the South?" "Nothing," he answered, "but an acknowledgment that slavery is right." "Holding as they do that slavery is morally right and socially elevating, they cannot cease to demand a full national recognition of it, as a legal right and a social blessing. Nor can we justifiably withhold this on any ground save our conviction that slavery is wrong." That being so, there was no use, he said, in "groping about for some middle ground between right and wrong," or in "a policy of 'don't care' on a question about which all true men do care." And there is ample evidence that he understood rightly the policy of the South. It is very doubtful whether any large extension of cultivation by slave labour was economically possible in Kansas or in regions yet further North, but we have seen to what lengths the Southern leaders would go in the attempt to secure even a limited recognition of slavery as lawful in a new State. They were not succeeding in the business of the Kansas Constitution. But they had a very good prospect of a far more important success. The celebrated dicta of Chief Justice Taney and other judges in the Dred Scott case had not amounted to an actual decision, nor if they had would a single decision have been irreversible. Whether the principle of them should become fixed in American Constitutional law depended (though this could not be openly said) on whether future appointments to the Supreme Court were to be made by a President who shared Taney's views; whether the executive action of the President was governed by the same views; and on the subtle pressure which outside opinion does exercise, and in this case had surely exercised, upon judicial minds. If the simple principle that the right to a slave is just one form of the ordinary right to property once became firmly fixed in American jurisprudence it is hard to see how any laws prohibiting slavery could have continued to be held constitutional except in States which were free States when the Constitution was adopted. Of course, a State like New York where slaves were industrially useless would not therefore have been filled with slave plantations, but, among a loyally minded people, the tradition which reprobated slavery would have been greatly weakened. The South would have been freed from the sense that slavery was a doomed institution. If attempts to plant slavery further in the West with profit failed, there was Cuba and there was Central America, on which filibustering raids already found favour in the South, and in which the national Government might be led to adopt schemes of conquest or annexation. Moreover, it was avowed by leaders like Jefferson Davis that though it might be impracticable to hope for the repeal of the prohibition of the slave trade, at least some relaxation of its severity ought to be striven for, in the interest of Texas and New Mexico and of possible future Territories where there might be room for more slaves. Such were the views of the leaders whose influence preponderated with the present President and in the main with the present Congress. When Lincoln judged that a determined stand against their policy was required, and further that no such stand could be possible to a party which had embraced Douglas with his principle, "I care not whether slavery be voted up or voted down," there is no doubt now that he was right and the great body of Republican authority opposed to him wrong.

When Lincoln and his friends in Illinois determined to fight Douglas, it became impossible for the Republican party as a whole to fall far behind them. This was in itself at that crisis an important thing. Lincoln added greatly to its importance by the opening words in the first speech of his campaign. They were the most carefully prepared words that he had yet spoken, and the most momentous that he had spoken till now or perhaps ever spoke. There is nothing in them for which what has been said of the situation and of his views will not have prepared us, and nothing which thousands of men might not have said to one another in private for a year or two before. But the first public avowal by a responsible man in trenchant phrase, that a grave issue has been joined upon which one party or the other must accept entire defeat, may be an event of great and perilous consequence.

He said: "If we could first know where we are and whither we are tending, we could better judge what to do and how to do it. We are now far into the fifth year since a policy was initiated with the avowed object, and confident promise, of putting an end to slavery agitation. Under the operation of that policy, that agitation has not only not ceased, but has constantly augmented. In my opinion it will not cease until a crisis shall have been reached and passed. 'A house divided against itself cannot stand.' I believe this Government cannot endure permanently half slave and half free. I do not expect the Union to be dissolved—I do not expect the house to fall—but I do expect that it will cease to be divided. It will become all one thing or all the other. Either the opponents of slavery will arrest the further spread of it and place it where the public mind shall rest in the belief that it is in course of ultimate extinction, or its advocates will push it forward till it shall become lawful alike in all the States, old as well as new—North as well as South."

It may perhaps be said that American public opinion has in the past been very timid in facing clear-cut issues. But, as has already been observed, an apt phrase crystallising the unspoken thought of many is even more readily caught up in America than anywhere else; so, though but few people in States at a distance paid much attention to the rest of the debates, or for a while again to Lincoln, the comparison of the house divided against itself produced an effect in the country which did not wear out. In this whole passage, moreover, Lincoln had certainly formulated the question before the nation more boldly, more clearly, more truly than any one before. It is impossible to estimate such influences precisely, but this was among the speeches that rank as important actions, and the story, most characteristic of the speaker, which lay behind it, is worth relating in detail. Lincoln had actually in a speech in 1856 declared that the United States could not long endure half slave and half free. "What in God's name," said some friend after the meeting, "could induce you to promulgate such an opinion?" "Upon my soul," he said, "I think it is true," and he could not be argued out of this opinion. Finally the friend protested that, true or not, no good could come of spreading this opinion abroad, and after grave reflection Lincoln promised not to utter it again for the present. Now, in 1858, having prepared his speech he read it to Herndon. Herndon questioned whether the passage on the divided house was politic. Lincoln said: "I would rather be defeated with this expression in my speech, and uphold and discuss it before the people, than be victorious without it." Once more, just before he delivered it, he read it over to a dozen or so of his closest supporters, for it was his way to discuss his intentions fully with friends, sometimes accepting their advice most submissively and sometimes disregarding it wholly. One said it was "ahead of its time," another that it was a "damned fool utterance." All more or less strongly condemned it, except this time Herndon, who, according to his recollection, said, "It will make you President." He listened to all and then addressed them, we are told, substantially as follows: "Friends, this thing has been retarded long enough. The time has come when these sentiments should be uttered; and if it is decreed that I should go down because of this speech, then let me go down linked to the truth—let me die in the advocacy of what is just and right." Rather a memorable pronouncement of a candidate to his committee; and the man who records it is insistent upon every little illustration he can find both of Lincoln's cunning and of his ambition.

Lincoln did go down in this particular contest. Many friends wrote and reproved him after this "damned fool utterance," but his defeat was not, after all, attributed to that. All the same he did himself assure his defeat, and he did it with extraordinary skill, for the purpose of ensuring that the next President should be a Republican President, though it is impossible he should at that time have counted upon being himself that Republican. Each candidate had undertaken to answer set questions which his opponent might propound to him. And great public attention was paid to the answers to these interrogatories. The Dred Scott judgments created a great difficulty for Douglas; he was bound to treat them as right; but if they were right and Congress had no power to prohibit slavery in a Territory, neither could a Territorial Legislature with authority delegated by Congress have that power; and, if this were made clear, it would seem there was an end of that free choice of the people in the Territories of which Douglas had been the great advocate. Douglas would use all his evasive skill in keeping away from this difficult point. If, however, he could be forced to face it Lincoln knew what he would say. He would say that slavery would not be actually unlawful in a Territory, but would never actually exist in it if the Territorial Legislature chose to abstain, as it could, from passing any of the laws which would in practice be necessary to protect slave property. By advocating this view Douglas would fully reassure those of his former supporters in Illinois who puzzled themselves on the Dred Scott case, but he would infuriate the South. Lincoln determined to force Douglas into this position by the questions which he challenged him to answer. When he told his friends of his ambition, they all told him he would lose his election. "Gentlemen," said Lincoln, "I am killing larger game; if Douglas answers, he can never be President, and the battle of 1860 is worth a hundred of this." The South was already angry with Douglas for his action over the Kansas Constitution, but he would have been an invincible candidate for the South to support in 1860, and it must have told in his favour that his offence then had been one of plain honesty. But in this fresh offence the Southern leaders had some cause to accuse him of double dealing, and they swore he should not be President.

A majority of the new Illinois Legislature returned Douglas to the Senate. Lincoln, however, had an actual majority of the votes of the whole State. Probably also he had gained a hold on Illinois for the future out of all proportion to the actual number of votes then given against the popular Douglas, and above all he had gathered to him a band of supporters who had unbounded belief in him. But his fall for the moment was little noticed or regretted outside Illinois, or at any rate in the great Eastern States, to which Illinois was, so to speak, the provinces and he a provincial attorney. His first words in the campaign had made a stir, but the rest of his speeches in these long debates could not be much noticed at a distance. Douglas had won, and the presumption was that he had proved himself the better man. Lincoln had performed what, apart from results, was a work of intellectual merit beyond the compass of any American statesman since Hamilton; moreover, as can now be seen, there had been great results; for, first, the young Republican party had not capitulated and collapsed, and, then, the great Democratic party, established in power, in indifference, and in complicity with wrong, was split clean in two. But these were not results that could be read yet awhile in election figures. Meanwhile the exhausted Lincoln reconciled himself for the moment to failure. As a private man he was thoroughly content that he could soon work off his debt for his election expenses, could earn about 500 pounds a year, and be secure in the possession of the little house and the 2,000 pounds capital which was "as much as any man ought to have." As a public man he was sadly proud that he had at least "said some words which may bear fruit after I am forgotten." Persistent melancholy and incurable elasticity can go together, and they make a very strong combination. The tone of resignation had not passed away from his comparatively intimate letters when he was writing little notes to one political acquaintance and another inciting them to look forward to the fun of the next fight.

4. John Brown.

For the next few months the excitements of the great political world concern this biography little. There was strife between Davis and Douglas in the Senate. At a meeting strong against slavery, Seward regained courage from the occasion and roused the North with grave and earnest words about the "irrepressible conflict." The "underground railway," or chain of friendly houses by which fugitive slaves were stealthily passed on to Canada, became famous. Methodist professors riotously attempted to rescue an arrested fugitive at Oberlin. A Southern grand jury threw out the bill of indictment against a slave-trading crew caught red-handed. In California Democrats belonging to what was nicknamed "the chivalry" forced upon Senator Broderick, a literally democratic Irishman and the bravest of the Democrats who stood out for fair treatment to Kansas, a duel in which he might fairly be said to have been murdered. The one event which demands more than allusion was the raid and the death of John Brown.

John Brown, in whom Puritan religion, as strict as that of his ancestors on the Mayflower, put forth gentler beauties of character than his sanguinary mission may suggest, had been somewhat of a failure as a scientific farmer, but as a leader of fighting men in desperate adventure only such men as Drake or Garibaldi seem to have excelled him. More particularly in the commotions in Kansas he had led forays, slain ruthlessly, witnesses dry-eyed the deaths of several of his tall, strong sons, and as a rule earned success by cool judgment—all, as he was absolutely sure, at the clear call of God. In October, 1859—how and with whose help the stroke was prepared seems to be a question of some mystery—John Brown, gathering a little band of Abolitionists and negroes, invaded the slave States and seized the United States arsenal at Harper's Ferry in Virginia. In the details, which do not matter, of this tiny campaign, John Brown seems, for the first time in his life, to have blundered badly. This was the only thing that lay upon his conscience towards the last. What manner of success he can have expected does not appear; most likely he had neither care nor definite expectation as to the result. The United States troops under Robert Lee, soon to be famous, of course overcame him quickly. One of his prisoners describes how he held out to the last; a dead son beside him; one hand on the pulse of a dying son, his rifle in the other. He was captured, desperately wounded. Southerners could not believe the fact that Brown had not contemplated some hideous uprising of slaves against their wives and children, but he only wished to conquer them with the sword of the Lord and of Gideon, quietly freeing slaves as he went. So naturally there was talk of lynching, but the Virginian gentlemen concerned would not have that. Governor Wise, of Virginia, had some talk with him and justified his own high character rather than Brown's by the estimate he gave of him in a speech at Richmond. Brown was hanged. "Stonewall" Jackson, a brother fanatic, if that is the word, felt the spectacle "awful," as he never felt slaughter in battle, and "put up a prayer that if possible Brown might be saved." "So perish all foes of the human race," said the officer commanding on the occasion, and the South generally felt the like.

A little before his death Brown was asked: "How do you justify your acts?" He said: "I think, my friend, you are guilty of a great wrong against God and humanity—I say it without wishing to be offensive—and it would be perfectly right for any one to interfere with you so far as to free those you wilfully and wickedly hold in bondage. I think I did right, and that others will do right who interfere with you at any time and at all times." In a conversation still later, he is reported to have concluded: "I wish to say furthermore that you had better—all you people at the South—prepare yourselves for a settlement of this question, that must come up for settlement sooner than you are prepared for it. You may dispose of me very easily. I am nearly disposed of now. But this question is still to be settled—this negro question I mean. The end of that is not yet." To a friend he wrote that he rejoiced like Paul because he knew like Paul that "if they killed him, it would greatly advance the cause of Christ."

Lincoln, who regarded lawlessness and slavery as twin evils, could only say of John Brown's raid: "That affair, in its philosophy, corresponds with the many attempts related in history at the assassination of kings and emperors. An enthusiast broods over the oppression of a people till he fancies himself commissioned by Heaven to liberate them. He ventures the attempt, which ends in little else than his own execution. Orsini's attempt on Louis Napoleon and John Brown's attempt at Harper's Ferry were, in their philosophy, precisely the same." Seward, it must be recorded, spoke far more sympathetically of him than Lincoln; and far more justly, for there is a flaw somewhere in this example, as his chief biographer regards it, of "Mr. Lincoln's common-sense judgment." John Brown had at least left to every healthy-minded Northern boy a memory worth much in the coming years of war and, one hopes, ever after. He had well deserved to be the subject of a song which, whatever may be its technical merits as literature, does stir. Emerson took the same view of him as the song writer, and Victor Hugo suggested as an epitaph for him: "Pro Christo sicut Christus." A calmer poet, Longfellow, wrote in his diary on Friday, December 2, 1859, the day when Brown was hanged: "This will be a great day in our history, the date of a new revolution, quite as much needed as the old one. Even now, as I write, they are leading old John Brown to execution in Virginia for attempting to rescue slaves. This is sowing the wind to reap the whirlwind, which will soon come."

Any one who is interested in Lincoln is almost forced to linger over the contrasting though slighter character who crossed the stage just before he suddenly took the principal part upon it. Men like John Brown may be fitly ranked with the equally rare men who, steering a very different course, have consistently acted out the principles of the Quakers, constraining no man whether by violence or by law, yet going into the thick of life prepared at all times to risk all. All such men are abnormal in the sense that most men literally could not put life through on any similar plan and would be wrong and foolish to try. The reason is that most men have a wider range of sympathy and of intellect than they. But the common sense of most of us revolts from any attitude of condemnation or condescension towards them; for they are more disinterested than most of us, more single-minded, and in their own field often more successful. With a very clear conscience we refuse to take example from these men whose very defects have operated in them as a special call; but undoubtedly most of us regard them with a warmth of sympathy which we are slow to accord to safer guides. We turn now from John Brown, who saw in slavery a great oppression, and was very angry, and went ahead slaying the nearest oppressor and liberating—for some days at least—the nearest slave, to a patient being, who, long ago in his youth, had boiled with anger against slavery, but whose whole soul now expressed itself in a policy of deadly moderation towards it: "Let us put back slavery where the fathers placed it, and there let it rest in peace." We are to study how he acted when in power. In almost every department of policy we shall see him watching and waiting while blood flows, suspending judgment, temporising, making trial of this expedient and of that, adopting in the end, quite unthanked, the measure of which most men will say, when it succeeds, "That is what we always said should be done." Above all, in that point of policy which most interests us, we shall witness the long postponement of the blow that killed negro slavery, the steady subordination of this particular issue to what will not at once appeal to us as a larger and a higher issue. All this provoked at the time in many excellent and clever men dissatisfaction and deep suspicion; they longed for a leader whose heart visibly glowed with a sacred passion; they attributed his patience, the one quality of greatness which after a while everybody might have discerned in him, not to a self-mastery which almost passed belief, but to a tepid disposition and a mediocre if not a low level of desire. We who read of him to-day shall not escape our moments of lively sympathy with these grumblers of the time; we shall wish that this man could ever plunge, that he could ever see red, ever commit some passionate injustice; we shall suspect him of being, in the phrase of a great philosopher, "a disgustingly well-regulated person," lacking that indefinable quality akin to the honest passions of us ordinary men, but deeper and stronger, which alone could compel and could reward any true reverence for his memory. These moments will recur but they cannot last. A thousand little things, apparent on the surface but deeply significant; almost every trivial anecdote of his boyhood, his prime, or his closing years; his few recorded confidences; his equally few speeches made under strong emotion; the lineaments of his face described by observers whom photography corroborated; all these absolutely forbid any conception of Abraham Lincoln as a worthy commonplace person fortunately fitted to the requirements of his office at the moment, or as merely a "good man" in the negative and disparaging sense to which that term is often wrested. It is really evident that there were no frigid perfections about him at all; indeed the weakness of some parts of his conduct is so unlike what seems to be required of a successful ruler that it is certain some almost unexampled quality of heart and mind went to the doing of what he did. There is no need to define that quality. The general wisdom of his statesmanship will perhaps appear greater and its not infrequent errors less the more fully the circumstances are appreciated. As to the man, perhaps the sense will grow upon us that this balanced and calculating person, with his finger on the pulse of the electorate while he cracked his uncensored jests with all comers, did of set purpose drink and refill and drink again as full and fiery a cup of sacrifice as ever was pressed to the lips of hero or of saint.

5. The Election of Lincoln.

Unlooked-for events were now raising Lincoln to the highest place which his ambition could contemplate. His own action in the months that followed his defeat by Douglas cannot have contributed much to his surprising elevation, yet it illustrates well his strength and his weakness, his real fitness, now and then startlingly revealed, for the highest position, and the superficial unfitness which long hid his capacity from many acute contemporaries.

In December, 1859, he made a number of speeches in Kansas and elsewhere in the West, and in February, 1860, he gave a memorable address in the Cooper Institute in New York before as consciously intellectual an audience as could be collected in that city, proceeding afterwards to speak in several cities of New England. His appearance at the Cooper Institute, in particular, was a critical venture, and he knew it. There was natural curiosity about this untutored man from the West. An exaggerated report of his wit prepared the way for probable disappointment. The surprise which awaited his hearers was of a different kind; they were prepared for a florid Western eloquence offensive to ears which were used to a less spontaneous turgidity; they heard instead a speech with no ornament at all, whose only beauty was that it was true and that the speaker felt it. The single flaw in the Cooper Institute speech has already been cited, the narrow view of Western respectability as to John Brown. For the rest, this speech, dry enough in a sense, is an incomparably masterly statement of the then political situation, reaching from its far back origin to the precise and definite question requiring decision at that moment. Mr. Choate, who as a young man was present, set down of late years his vivid recollection of that evening. "He appeared in every sense of the word like one of the plain people among whom he loved to be counted. At first sight there was nothing impressive or imposing about him; his clothes hung awkwardly on his giant frame; his face was of a dark pallor without the slightest tinge of colour; his seamed and rugged features bore the furrows of hardship and struggle; his deep-set eyes looked sad and anxious; his countenance in repose gave little evidence of the brilliant power which raised him from the lowest to the highest station among his countrymen; as he talked to me before the meeting he seemed ill at ease." We know, as a fact, that among his causes of apprehension, he was for the first time painfully conscious of those clothes. "When he spoke," proceeds Mr. Choate, "he was transformed; his eye kindled, his voice rang, his face shone and seemed to light up the whole assembly. For an hour and a half he held his audience in the hollow of his hand. His style of speech and manner of delivery were severely simple. What Lowell called 'the grand simplicities of the Bible,' with which he was so familiar, were reflected in his discourse. . . . It was marvellous to see how this untutored man, by mere self-discipline and the chastening of his own spirit, had outgrown all meretricious arts, and found his way to the grandeur and strength of absolute simplicity."

The newspapers of the day after this speech confirm these reverent reminiscences. On this, his first introduction to the cultivated world of the East, Lincoln's audience were at the moment and for the moment conscious of the power which he revealed. The Cooper Institute speech takes the plain principle that slavery is wrong, and draws the plain inference that it is idle to seek for common ground with men who say it is right. Strange but tragically frequent examples show how rare it is for statesmen in times of crisis to grasp the essential truth so simply. It is creditable to the leading men of New York that they recognised a speech which just at that time urged this plain thing in sufficiently plain language as a very great speech, and had an inkling of great and simple qualities in the man who made it. It is not specially discreditable that very soon and for a long while part of them, or of those who were influenced by their report, reverted to their former prejudices in regard to Lincoln. When they saw him thrust by election managers into the Presidency, very few indeed of what might be called the better sort believed, or could easily learn, that his great qualities were great enough to compensate easily for the many things he lacked. This specially grotesque specimen of the wild West was soon seen not to be of the charlatan type; as a natural alternative he was assumed to be something of a simpleton. Many intelligent men retained this view of him throughout the years of his trial, and, only when his triumph and tragic death set going a sort of Lincoln myth, began to recollect that "I came to love and trust him even before I knew him," or the like. A single speech like this at the Cooper Institute might be enough to show a later time that Lincoln was a man of great intellect, but it could really do little to prepare men in the East for what they next heard of him.

Already a movement was afoot among his friends in Illinois to secure his nomination for the Presidency at the Convention of the Republican party which was to be held in Chicago in May. Before that Convention could assemble it had become fairly certain that whoever might be chosen as the Republican candidate would be President of the United States, and signs were not wanting that he would be faced with grave peril to the Union. For the Democratic party, which had met in Convention at Charleston in April, had proceeded to split into two sections, Northern and Southern. This memorable Convention was a dignified assembly gathered in a serious mood in a city of some antiquity and social charm. From the first, however, a latent antipathy between the Northern and the Southern delegates made itself felt. The Northerners, predisposed to a certain deference towards the South and prepared to appreciate its graceful hospitality, experienced an uneasy sense that they were regarded as social inferiors. Worse trouble than this appeared when the Convention met for its first business, the framing of the party platform. Whether the position which Lincoln had forced Douglas to take up had precipitated this result or not, dissension between Northern and Southern Democrats on the subject of slavery had already manifested itself in Congress, and in the party Convention the division became irreparable. Douglas, it will be remembered, had started with the principle that slavery in the Territories formed a question for the people of each territory to decide; he had felt bound to accept the doctrine underlying the Dred Scott judgments, according to which slavery was by the Constitution lawful in all territories; pressed by Lincoln, he had tried to reconcile his original position with this doctrine by maintaining that while slavery was by the Constitution lawful in every Territory it was nevertheless lawful for a Territorial Legislature to make slave-owning practically impossible. In framing a declaration of the party principles as to slavery the Southern delegates in the Democratic Convention aimed at meeting this evasion. With considerable show of logic they asserted, in the party platform which they proposed, not merely the abstract rightfulness and lawfulness of slavery, but the duty of Congress itself to make any provision that might be necessary to protect it in the Territories. To this the Northern majority of the delegates could not consent; they carried an amendment declaring merely that they would abide by any decision of the Supreme Court as to slavery. Thereupon the delegates, not indeed of the whole South but of all the cotton-growing States except Georgia, withdrew from the Convention. The remaining delegates were, under the rules of the Convention, too few to select a candidate for the Presidency, and the Convention adjourned, to re-assemble at Baltimore in June. Eventually, after attempts at reunion and further dissensions, two separate Democratic Conventions at Baltimore, a Northern and a Southern, nominated, as their respective candidates, Stephen Douglas, the obvious choice with whom, if the Southerners had cared to temporise further, a united Democratic party could have swept the polls, and John C. Breckinridge of Kentucky, a gentleman not otherwise known than as the standard bearer on this great occasion of the undisguised and unmitigated claims of the slave owners.

Thus it was that the American Democratic party forfeited power for twenty-four years, divided between the consistent maintenance of a paradox and the adroit maintenance of inconsistency. Another party in this election demands a moment's notice. A Convention of delegates, claiming to represent the old Whigs, met also at Baltimore and declared merely that it stood for "the Constitution of the country, the union of the States, and the enforcement of the laws." They nominated for the Presidency John Bell of Tennessee, and for the Vice-Presidency Edward Everett. This latter gentleman was afterwards chosen as the orator of the day at the ceremony on the battlefield of Gettysburg when Lincoln's most famous speech was spoken. He was a travelled man and a scholar; he was Secretary of State for a little while under Fillmore, and dealt honestly and firmly with the then troublous question of Cuba. His orations deserve to be looked at, for they are favourable examples of the eloquence which American taste applauded, and as such they help to show how original Lincoln was in the simpler beauty of his own simpler diction. In justice to the Whigs, let it be noted that they declared for the maintenance of the Union, committing themselves with decision on the question of the morrow; but it was a singular platform that resolutely and totally ignored the only issue of the day. Few politicians can really afford to despise either this conspicuously foolish attempt to overcome a difficulty by shutting one's eyes to it, or the more plausible proposal of the Northern Democrats to continue temporising with a movement for slavery in which they were neither bold enough nor corrupted enough to join. The consequences, now known to us, of a determined stand against the advance of slavery were instinctively foreseen by these men, and they cannot be blamed for shrinking from them. Yet the historian now, knowing that those consequences exceeded in terror all that could have been foreseen, can only agree with the judgment expressed by Lincoln in one of his Kansas speeches: "We want and must have a national policy as to slavery which deals with it as being a wrong. Whoever would prevent slavery becoming national and perpetual yields all when he yields to a policy which treats it either as being right, or as being a matter of indifference." The Republican party had been founded upon just this opinion. Electoral victory was now being prepared for it, not because a majority was likely yet to take so resolute a view, but because its effective opponents were divided between those who had gone the length of calling slavery right and those who strove to treat it as indifferent. The fate of America may be said to have depended in the early months of 1860 on whether the nominee of the Republican party was a man who would maintain its principles with irresolution, or with obstinacy, or with firm moderation.

When it had first been suggested to Lincoln in the course of 1859 that he might be that nominee he said, "I do not think myself fit for the Presidency." This was probably his sincere opinion at the moment, though perhaps the moment was one of dejection. In any case his opinion soon changed, and though it is not clear whether he encouraged his friends to bring his name forward, we know in a general way that when they decided to do so he used every effort of his own to help them. We must accept without reserve Herndon's reiterated assertion that Lincoln was intensely ambitious; and, if ambition means the eager desire for great opportunities, the depreciation of it, which has long been a commonplace of literature, and which may be traced back to the Epicureans, is a piece of cant which ought to be withdrawn from currency, and ambition, commensurate with the powers which each man can discover in himself, should be frankly recognised as a part of Christian duty. In judging him to be the best man for the Presidency, Lincoln's Illinois friends and he himself formed a very sensible judgment, but they did so in flagrant contradiction to many superficial appearances. This candidate for the chief magistracy at a critical time of one of the great nations of the world had never administered any concern much larger than that post office that he once "carried around in his hat." Of the several other gentlemen whose names were before the party there was none who might not seem greatly to surpass him in experience of affairs. To one of them, Seward, the nomination seemed to belong almost of right. Chase and Seward both were known and dignified figures in that great assembly the Senate. Chase was of proved rectitude and courage, Seward of proved and very considerable ability. Chase had been Governor of Ohio, Seward of New York State; and the position of Governor in a State—a State it must be remembered is independent in almost the whole of what we call domestic politics—is strictly analogous to the position of President in the Union, and, especially in a great State, is the best training ground for the Presidency. But beyond this, Seward, between whom and Lincoln the real contest lay, had for some time filled a recognised though unofficial position as the leader of his party. He had failed, as has been seen in his dealings with Douglas, in stern insistence upon principle, but the failure was due rather to his sanguine and hopeful temper than to lack of courage. On the whole from the time when he first stood up against Webster in the discussions of 1850, when Lincoln was both silent and obscure, he had earned his position well. Hereafter, as Lincoln's subordinate, he was to do his country first-rate service, and to earn a pure fame as the most generously loyal subordinate to a chief whom he had thought himself fit to command. We happen to have ample means of estimating now all Lincoln's Republican competitors; we know that none of the rest were equal to Seward; and we know that Seward himself, if he had had his way, would have brought the common cause to ruin. Looking back now at the comparison which Lincoln, when he entered into the contest, must have drawn between himself and Seward—for of the rest we need not take account—we can see that to himself at least and some few in Illinois he had now proved his capacities, and that in Seward's public record, more especially in his attitude towards Douglas, he had the means of measuring Seward. In spite of the far greater experience of the latter he may have thought himself to be his superior in that indefinable thing—the sheer strength of a man. Not only may he have thought this; he must have known it. He had shown his grasp of the essential facts when he forced the Republican party to do battle with Douglas and the party of indifference; he showed the same now when, after long years of patience and self-discipline, he pushed himself into Seward's place as the Republican leader.

All the same, what little we know of the methods by which he now helped his own promotion suggests that the people who then and long after set him down as a second-rate person may have had a good deal to go upon. A kind friend has produced a letter which he wrote in March, 1860, to a Kansas gentleman who desired to be a delegate to the Republican Convention, and who offered, upon condition, to persuade his fellow delegates from Kansas to support Lincoln. Here is the letter: "As to your kind wishes for myself, allow me to say I cannot enter the ring on the money basis—first because in the main it is wrong; and secondly I have not and cannot get the money. I say in the main the use of money is wrong; but for certain objects in a political contest the use of some is both right and indispensable. With me, as with yourself, this long struggle has been one of great pecuniary loss. I now distinctly say this: If you shall be appointed a delegate to Chicago I will furnish one hundred dollars to bear the expenses of the trip." The Kansas gentleman failed to obtain the support of the Kansas delegates as a body for Lincoln. Lincoln none the less held to his promise of a hundred dollars if the man came to Chicago; and, having, we are assured, much confidence in him, took the earliest opportunity of appointing him to a lucrative office, besides consulting him as to other appointments in Kansas. This is all that we know of the affair, but our informant presents it as one of a number of instances in which Lincoln good-naturedly trusted a man too soon, and obstinately clung to his mistake. As to the appointment, the man had evidently begun by soliciting money in a way which would have marked him to most of us as a somewhat unsuitable candidate for any important post; and the payment of the hundred dollars plainly transgresses a code both of honour and of prudence which most politicians will recognise and which should not need definition. To say, as Lincoln probably said to himself, that there is nothing intrinsically wrong in a moderate payment for expenses to a fellow worker in a public cause, whom you believe to have sacrificed much, is to ignore the point, indeed several points. Lincoln, hungry now for some success in his own unrewarded career, was tempted to a small manoeuvre by which he might pick up a little support; he was at the same time tempted, no less, to act generously (according to his means) towards a man who, he readily believed, had made sacrifices like his own. He was not the man to stand against this double temptation.

Petty lapses of this order, especially when the delinquent may be seen to hesitate and excuse himself, are more irritating than many larger and more brazen offences, for they give us the sense of not knowing where we are. When they are committed by a man of seemingly strong and high character, it is well to ask just what they signify. Some of the shrewdest observers of Lincoln, friendly and unfriendly, concur in their description of the weaknesses of which this incident may serve as the example, weaknesses partly belonging to his temperament, but partly such as a man risen from poverty, with little variety of experience and with no background of home training, stands small chance of escaping. For one thing his judgment of men and how to treat them was as bad in some ways as it was good in others. His own sure grasp of the largest and commonest things in life, and his sober and measured trust in human nature as a whole, gave him a rare knowledge of the mind of the people in the mass. So, too, when he had known a man long, or been with him or against him in important transactions, he sometimes developed great insight and sureness of touch; and, when the man was at bottom trustworthy, his robust confidence in him was sometimes of great public service. But he had no gift of rapid perception and no instinctive tact or prudence in regard to the very numerous and very various men with whom he had slight dealings on which he could bestow no thought. This is common with men who have risen from poverty; if they have not become hard and suspicious, they are generally obtuse to the minor indications by which shrewd men of education know the impostor, and they are perversely indulgent to little meannesses in their fellows which they are incapable of committing themselves. In Lincoln this was aggravated by an immense good-nature—as he confessed, he could hardly say "no";—it was an obstinate good-nature, which found a naughty pleasure in refusing to be corrected; and if it should happen that the object of his weak benevolence had given him personal cause of offence, the good-nature became more incorrigible than ever. Moreover, Lincoln's strength was a slow strength, shown most in matters in which elementary principles of right or the concentration of intense thought guided him. Where minor and more subtle principles of conduct should have come in, on questions which had not come within the range of his reflection so far and to which, amidst his heavy duties, he could not spare much cogitation, he would not always show acute perception, and, which is far worse, he would often show weakness of will. The present instance may be ever so trifling, yet it does relate to the indistinct and dangerous borderland of political corruption. It need arouse no very serious suspicions. Mr. Herndon, whose pertinacious researches unearthed that Kansas gentleman's correspondence, and who is keenly censorious of Lincoln's fault, in the upshot trusts and reveres Lincoln. And the massive testimony of his keenest critics to his honesty quite decides the matter. But Lincoln had lived in a simple Western town, not in one of the already polluted great cities; he was a poor man himself and took the fact that wealth was used against him as a part of the inevitable drawbacks of his lot; and it is certain that he did not clearly take account of the whole business of corruption and jobbery as a hideous and growing peril to America. It is certain too that he lacked the delicate perception of propriety in such matters, or the strict resolution in adhering to it on small occasions, which might have been possessed by a far less honest man. The severest criticisms which Lincoln afterwards incurred were directed to the appointments which he made; we shall see hereafter that he had very solid reasons for his general conduct in such matters; but it cannot be said with conviction that he had that horror of appointment on other grounds than merit which enlightens, though it does not always govern, more educated statesmen. His administration would have been more successful, and the legacy he left to American public life more bountiful, if his traditions, or the length of his day's work, had allowed him to be more careful in these things. As it is he was not commended to the people of America and must not be commended to us by the absence of defects as a ruler or as a man, but by the qualities to which his defects belonged. An acute literary man wrote of Lincoln, when he had been three years in office, these remarkable words: "You can't help feeling an interest in him, a sympathy and a kind of pity; feeling, too, that he has some qualities of great value, yet fearing that his weak points may wreck him or may wreck something. His life seems a series of wise, sound conclusions, slowly reached, oddly worked out, on great questions with constant failures in administration of detail and dealings with individuals." It was evidently a clever man who wrote this; he would have been a wise man if he had known that the praise he was bestowing on Lincoln was immeasurably greater than the blame.

So the natural prejudice of those who welcomed Lincoln as a prophet in the Cooper Institute but found his candidature for the Presidency ridiculous, was not wholly without justification. His partisans, however—also not unjustly—used his humble origin for all it was worth. The Republicans of Illinois were assembled at Decatur in preparation for the Chicago Convention, when, amid tumultuous cheers, there marched in old John Hanks and another pioneer bearing on their shoulders two long fence rails labelled: "Two rails from a lot made by Abraham Lincoln and John Hanks in the Sangamon Bottom in the year 1830." "Gentlemen," said Lincoln, in response to loud calls, "I suppose you want to know something about those things. Well, the truth is, John Hanks and I did make rails in the Sangamon Bottom. I don't know whether we made those rails or not; fact is, I don't think they are a credit to the makers. But I do know this: I made rails then, and I think I could make better ones than these now." It is unnecessary to tell of the part those rails were to play in the coming campaign. It is a contemptible trait in books like that able novel "Democracy," that they treat the sentiment which attached to the "Rail-splitter" as anything but honourable.

The Republican Convention met at Chicago in circumstances of far less dignity than the Democratic Convention at Charleston. Processions and brass bands, rough fellows collected by Lincoln's managers, rowdies imported from New York by Seward's, filled the streets with noise; and the saloon keepers did good business. Yet the actual Convention consisted of grave men in an earnest mood. Besides Seward and Chase and Lincoln, Messrs. Cameron of Pennsylvania and Bates of Missouri, of whom we shall hear later, were proposed for the Presidency. So also were Messrs. Dayton and Collamer, politicians of some repute; and McLean, of the Supreme Court, had some supporters. The prevalent expectation in the States was that Seward would easily secure the nomination, but it very soon appeared in the Convention that his opponents were too strong for that. Several ballots took place; there were the usual conferences and bargainings, which probably affected the result but little; Lincoln's managers, especially Judge David Davis, afterwards of the Supreme Court, were shrewd people; Lincoln had written to them expressly that they could make no bargain binding on him, but when Cameron was clearly out of the running they did promise Cameron's supporters a place in Lincoln's Cabinet, and a similar promise was made for one Caleb Smith. The delegates from Pennsylvania went on to Lincoln; then those of Ohio; and before long his victory was assured. A Committee of the Convention, some of them sick at heart, was sent to bear the invitation to Lincoln. He received them in his little house with a simple dignity which one of them has recorded; and as they came away one said, "Well, we might have chosen a handsomer article, but I doubt whether a better."

On the whole, if we can put aside the illusion which besets us, who read the preceding history if at all in the light of Lincoln's speeches, and to whom his competitors are mere names, this was the most surprising nomination ever made in America. Other Presidential candidates have been born in poverty, but none ever wore the scars of poverty so plainly; others have been intrinsically more obscure, but these have usually been chosen as bearing the hall-mark of eminent prosperity or gentility. Lincoln had indeed at this time displayed brilliant ability in the debates with Douglas, and he had really shown a statesman's grasp of the situation more than any other Republican leader. The friends in Illinois who put him forward—men like David Davis, who was a man of distinction himself—did so from a true appreciation of his powers. But this does not seem to have been the case with the bulk of the delegates from other States. The explanation given us of their action is curious. The choice was not the result of merit; on the other hand, it was not the work of the ordinary wicked wire-puller, for what may be called the machine was working for Seward. The choice was made by plain representative Americans who set to themselves this question: "With what candidate can we beat Douglas?" and who found the answer in the prevalence of a popular impression, concerning Lincoln and Seward, which was in fact wholly mistaken. There was, it happens, earnest opposition to Seward among some Eastern Republicans on the good ground that he was a clean man but with doubtful associates. This opposition could not by itself have defeated him. What did defeat him was his reputation at the moment as a very advanced Republican who would scare away the support of the weaker brethren. He was, for instance, the author of the alarming phrase about "irrepressible conflict," and he had spoken once, in a phrase that was misinterpreted, about "a higher law than the Constitution." Lincoln had in action taken a far stronger line than Seward; he was also the author of the phrase about the house divided against itself; but then, besides the fact that Lincoln was well regarded just where Douglas was most popular, Lincoln was a less noted man than Seward and his stronger words occasioned less wide alarm. So, to please those who liked compromise, the Convention rejected a man who would certainly have compromised, and chose one who would give all that moderation demanded and die before he yielded one further inch. Many Americans have been disposed to trace in the raising up of Lincoln the hand of a Providence protecting their country in its worst need. It would be affectation to set their idea altogether aside; it is, at any rate, a memorable incident in the history of a democracy, permeated with excellent intentions but often hopelessly subject to inferior influences, that at this critical moment the fit man was chosen on the very ground of his supposed unfitness.

The result of the contest between the four Presidential candidates was rendered almost a foregone conclusion by the decision of the Democrats. Lincoln in deference to the usual and seemly procedure took no part in the campaign, nor do his doings in the next months concern us. Seward, to his great honour, after privately expressing his bitter chagrin at the bestowal of what was his due upon "a little Illinois attorney," threw himself whole-heartedly into the contest, and went about making admirable speeches. On the night of November 6, Lincoln sat alone with the operator in the telegraph box at Springfield, receiving as they came in the results of the elections of Presidential electors in the various States. Long before the returns were complete his knowledge of such matters made him sure of his return, and before he left that box he had solved in principle, as he afterwards declared, the first and by no means least important problem of his Presidency, the choice of a Cabinet.

The victory was in one aspect far from complete. If we look not at the votes in the Electoral College with which the formal choice of President lay, but at the popular votes by which the electors were returned, we shall see that the new President was elected by a minority of the American people. He had a large majority over Douglas, but if Douglas had received the votes which were given for the Southern Democrat, Breckinridge, he would have had a considerable majority over Lincoln, though the odd machinery of the Electoral College would still have kept him out of the Presidency. In another aspect it was a fatally significant victory. Lincoln's votes were drawn only from the Northern States; he carried almost all the free States and he carried no others. For the first time in American history, the united North had used its superior numbers to outvote the South. This would in any case have caused great vexation, and the personality of the man chosen by the North aggravated it. The election of Lincoln was greeted throughout the South with a howl of derision.



CHAPTER VI

SECESSION

1. The Case of the South against the Union.

The Republicans of the North had given their votes upon a very clear issue, but probably few of them had fully realised how grave a result would follow. Within a few days of the election of Lincoln the first step in the movement of Secession had been taken, and before the new President entered upon his duties it was plain that either the dissatisfied States must be allowed to leave the Union or the Union must be maintained by war.

Englishmen at that time and since have found a difficulty in grasping the precise cause of the war that followed. Of those who were inclined to sympathise with the North, some regarded the war as being simply about slavery, and, while unhesitatingly opposed to slavery, wondered whether it was right to make war upon it; others, regarding it as a war for the Union and not against slavery at all, wondered whether it was right to make war for a Union that could not be peaceably maintained. Now it is seldom possible to state the cause of a war quite candidly in a single sentence, because as a rule there are on each side people who concur in the final rupture for somewhat different reasons. But, in this case, forecasting a conclusion which must be examined in some detail, we can state the cause of war in a very few sentences. If we ask first what the South fought for, the answer is: the leaders of the South and the great mass of the Southern people had a single supreme and all-embracing object in view, namely, to ensure the permanence and, if need be, the extension of the slave system; they carried with them, however, a certain number of Southerners who were opposed or at least averse to slavery, but who thought that the right of their States to leave the Union or remain in it as they chose must be maintained. If we ask what the North fought for, the answer is: A majority, by no means overwhelming, of the Northern people refused to purchase the adhesion of the South by conniving at any further extension of slavery, and an overwhelming majority refused to let the South dissolve the Union for slavery or for any other cause.

The issue about slavery, then, became merged in another issue, concerning the Union, which had so far remained in the background.

The first thing that must be grasped about it is the total difference of view which now existed between North and South in regard to the very nature of their connection. The divergence had taken place so completely and in the main so quietly that each side now realised with surprise and indignation that the other held an opposite opinion. In the North the Union was regarded as constituting a permanent and unquestionable national unity from which it was flat rebellion for a State or any other combination of persons to secede. In the South the Union appeared merely as a peculiarly venerable treaty of alliance, of which the dissolution would be very painful, but which left each State a sovereign body with an indefeasible right to secede if in the last resort it judged that the painful necessity had come. In a few border States there was division and doubt on this subject, a fact which must have helped to hide from each side the true strength of opinion on the other. But, setting aside these border States, there were in the North some who doubted whether it was expedient to fight for the Union, but none of any consequence who doubted that it was constitutionally correct; and there were in the South men who insisted that no occasion to secede had arisen, but these very men, when outvoted in their States, maintained most passionately the absolute right of secession.

The two sides contended for two contrary doctrines of constitutional law. It is natural when parties are disputing over a question of political wisdom and of moral right that each should claim for its contention if possible the sanction of acknowledged legal principle. So it was with the parties to the English Civil War, and the tendency to regard matters from a legal point of view is to this day deeply engrained in the mental habits of America. But North and South were really divided by something other than legal opinion, a difference in the objects to which their feelings of loyalty and patriotism were directed. This difference found apt expression in the Cabinet of President Buchanan, who of course remained in office between the election of Lincoln in November and his inauguration in March. General Cass of Michigan had formerly stood for the Presidency with the support of the South, and he held Cabinet office now as a sympathiser with the South upon slavery, but he was a Northerner. "I see how it is," he said to two of his colleagues; "you are a Virginian, and you are a South Carolinian; I am not a Michigander, I am an American."

In a former chapter the creation of the Union and the beginnings of a common national life have been traced in outline. Obstacles to the Union had existed both in the North and in the South, and, after it had been carried, the tendency to threaten disruption upon some slight conflict of interest had shown itself in each. But a proud sense of single nationality had soon become prevalent in both, and in the North nothing whatever had happened to set back this growth, for the idea which Lowell had once attributed to his Hosea Biglow of abjuring Union with slave owners was a negligible force. Undivided allegiance to the Union was the natural sentiment of citizens of Ohio or Wisconsin, States created by the authority of the Union out of the common dominion of the Union. It had become, if anything, more deeply engrained in the original States of the North, for their predominant occupation in commerce would tend in this particular to give them larger views. The pride of a Boston man in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts was of the same order as his pride in the city of Boston; both were largely pride in the part which Boston and Massachusetts had taken in making the United States of America. Such a man knew well that South Carolina had once threatened secession, but, for that matter, the so-called Federalists of New England had once threatened it. The argument of Webster in the case of South Carolina was a classic, and was taken as conclusive on the question of legal right. The terser and more resonant declaration of President Jackson, a Southerner, and the response to it which thrilled all States, South or North, outside South Carolina, had set the seal to Webster's doctrines. There had been loud and ominous talk of secession lately; it was certainly not mere bluster; Northerners in the main were cautious politicians and had been tempted to go far to conciliate it. But if the claim of Southern States were put in practice, the whole North would now regard it not as a respectable claim, but as an outrage.

It is important to notice that the disposition to take this view did not depend upon advanced opinions against slavery. Some of the most violent opponents of slavery would care relatively little about the Constitution or the Union; they would at first hesitate as to whether a peaceful separation between States which felt so differently on a moral question like slavery was not a more Christian solution of their difference than a fratricidal war. On the other hand, men who cared little about slavery, and would gladly have sacrificed any convictions they had upon that matter for the sake of the Union, were at first none the less vehement in their anger at an attack upon the Union. There is, moreover, a more subtle but still important point to be observed in this connection. Democrats in the North inclined as a party to stringent and perhaps pedantically legal views of State rights as against the rights of the Union; but this by no means necessarily meant that they sympathised more than Republicans with the claim to dissolve the Union. They laid emphasis on State rights merely because they believed that these would be a bulwark against any sort of government tyranny, and that the large power which was reserved to the local or provincial authorities of the States made the government of the nation as a whole more truly expressive of the will of the whole people. They now found themselves entangled (as we shall see) in curious doubts as to what the Federal Government might do to maintain the Union, but they had not the faintest doubt that the Union was meant to be maintained. The point which is now being emphasised must not be misapprehended; differences of sentiment in regard to slavery, in regard to State rights, in regard to the authority of Government, did, as the war went on and the price was paid, gravely embarrass the North; but it was a solid and unhesitating North which said that the South had no right to secede.

Up to a certain point the sense of patriotic pride in the Union had grown also in the South. It was fostered at first by the predominant part which the South played in the political life of the country. But for a generation past the sense of a separate interest of the South had been growing still more vigorously. The political predominance of the South had continued, but under a standing menace of downfall as the North grew more populous and the patriotism which it at first encouraged had become perverted into an arrogantly unconscious feeling that the Union was an excellent thing on condition that it was subservient to the South. The common interest of the Southern States was slavery; and, when the Northerners had become a majority which might one day dominate the Federal Government, this common interest of the slave States found a weapon at hand in the doctrine of the inherent sovereignty of each individual State. This doctrine of State sovereignty had come to be held as universally in the South as the strict Unionist doctrine in the North, and held with as quiet and unshakable a confidence that it could not be questioned. It does not seem at all strange that the State, as against the Union, should have remained the supreme object of loyalty in old communities like those of South Carolina and Virginia, abounding as they did in conservative influences which were lacking in the North. But this provincial loyalty was not in the same sense a natural growth in States like Alabama or Mississippi. These, no less than Indiana and Illinois, were the creatures of the Federal Congress, set up within the memory of living men, with arbitrary boundaries that cut across any old lines of division. There was, in fact, no spontaneous feeling of allegiance attaching to these political units, and the doctrine of their sovereignty had no use except as a screen for the interest in slavery which the Southern States had in common. But Calhoun, in a manner characteristic of his peculiar and dangerous type of intellect, had early seen in a view of State sovereignty, which would otherwise have been obsolete, the most serviceable weapon for the joint interests of the Southern States. In a society where intellectual life was restricted, his ascendency had been great, though his disciples had, reasonably enough, thrown aside the qualifications which his subtle mind had attached to the right of secession. Thus in the Southern States generally, even among men most strongly opposed to the actual proposal to secede, the real or alleged constitutional right of a State to secede if it chose now passed unquestioned and was even regarded as a precious liberty.